Before the hearing, protesters gathered outside the court in Aachen holding black banners with the messages "No peace for Nazi criminals", and "Don't forgive, don't forget". Inside there were shouts of "Nazis out, no fascists here" as two men with shaved heads and wearing black clothes took seats at the back of the court.

The session was adjourned after an hour and a half when the judges said they needed time to consider a defence motion to remove the lead prosecutor from the case. Boere's lawyers argued that Ulrich Maas has made statements to the press that call into doubt his objectivity. The judges adjourned proceedings until Monday to consider the motion.

Boere is accused of murdering a bicycle shop owner, a pharmacist and another civilian in 1944 while part of an SS squad believed to be responsible for 54 civilian killings during the war. He told a Dutch newspaper in 2007 he had acted in "another time, with different rules".

The son of a Dutch father and a German mother, Boere was 18 when Nazi forces invaded his hometown of Maastricht and the rest of the Netherlands in 1940. He joined the SS that year and fought on the Russian front before being sent back to the Netherlands as part a 15-man unit for operation Silbertanne, or silver fir.

The Silbertanne death squad consisted mostly of Dutch SS and eastern front veterans like Boere and was tasked with reprisal killings of the Dutch resistance. After he was captured by the allies at the end of the war Boere spent two years as a PoW in the Netherlands. It was while in captivity that Boere admitted the killings, but he escaped and fled to Germany before he could be tried.

He was sentenced to death in absentia by the Dutch authorities in 1949. This was later commuted to life imprisonment. He escaped jail time after German courts refused to extradite him or force him to serve the prison in Germany.